201 Comments Posted by dme

For $10,000, and using the proverbial ten-foot pole, I would stick the pole in there, stir it up, and see what came out (provided I was also wearing full hazmat gear), but I wouldn't get any closer than that for any amount of money!

Maybe someone can enlarge the label on the front leg? That might have a manufacture date or other useful information.

I don't think it's a WWII bombsight. If my father were still alive, I could show him the picture and ask for sure, because he was a navigator on bombers in the Pacific from 1943 until the end of the war. Unfortunately he died recently.

A search for Leeds and Northrup shows that the company made resistors, milivolt pontentiometers (I have NO idea what those are!), and other similar types of equipment. I couldn't find any pictures of anything that looked even remotely similar to this item, however.

Apparently changes in the market (what's new?) led to Leeds and Northrup becoming part of General Signal some years back, and subsequently, Leeds and Northrup was "sold off piecemeal, mostly to its nemesis, Honeywell."

I was directed to a company called Process Instruments in Pittsburgh which provides "calibration and repair services" and advertises itself as "legacy Leeds and Northrup, Honeywell and Hagan Support." There is another company in Forest Hill, MD that repairs Leeds and Northrup equipment.

So...now we know all that, and we still have no idea of what this is. Maybe we could send a copy of this picture to one of those repair companies to see if they know what it is.

I'm interested in hearing more about the patient shower rooms. I worked with a person with developmental disabilities who had been in an institution for nearly 50 years when the institution closed in the late 1990s. When we trained new staff to work with this person in the community home, we had to emphasize that only tub baths, rather than showers, be used because of his intense phobia of water falling on his face. This reportedly stemmed from the group showers that he had received in earlier years in the institution, which I know were not done to frighten or hurt patients, but were necessitated by lack of funding and staff to care for the large number of patients. Of course, any technique can conceivably be misused and perhaps at some point there was a caregiver who used the shower or water that was too hot or too cold as a means of behavioral control.

I think the round structure in the photograph is the one identified as Hooper Hall in the old photos on the Worcester State Hospital intro page. There is an interior photo also with a caption that identifies it as a day room. Perhaps one floor was the dormitory and the other floor was the day room?

The 1949 photos from Life Magazine on the intro page are wonderful! I had never been able to imagine what the "spinning chair" therapy looked like (all I could think of was one of my wonderful uncles who had a swivel chair in his ham radio room, and was the one adult who would let us kids spin as much as we wanted to). Is it true that a person with schizophrenia does not get dizzy from the spinning that makes a "normal" person dizzy? If so, there may be some medical significance to that....I know that schizophrenia usually emerges in a person's late teen years, and I remember that when I was a child, I could go on spinning rides at the fair over and over without dizziness (and never understood why my parents complained after one ride). Then when I was about sixteen, I went on a ride twice in a row, something I had done many times in previous years, and was so dizzy and sick that I had to sit on a bench for the next hour. It's probably two completely unrelated events that happen at the same time, but what would it mean if there is some kind of neural connection between not experiencing dizziness and the onset of schizophrenia?

John, Lisa, Adam...I don't understand your consternation at the quality of architecture devoted to hospitals for persons with mental illness. Why are patients with this kind of illness less deserving than any other group? Should their home look like a jail, as if the patients are convicted criminals? If a person you loved required this type of care, would you still complain about the "waste?" What about the employees--were they also undeserving of an attractive place to work? I am troubled by the idea that only certain types of people are worthy of beauty or attention or care.

As has already been said, you rake snow off a roof to prevent huge chunks of it from sliding off as it partially thaws. You also rake it off (especially that heavy wet snow that decimates tree branches and power lines) when it gets more than a few inches deep so that its weight doesn't cause your roof to collapse, and to prevent leaks when it begins to melt but can't drain because ice dams have formed in the gutters.

The program called "Life after People" on the History Channel (or maybe it's National Geographic) shows some interesting computer simulations of how vegetation would overtake abandoned buildings and what the area would look like after a year, five years, 100 years, etc. The underlying premise seems a logical impossibility to me (what could happen that would exterminate all human life but leave plant and animal life essentially intact?), but that doesn't take away from the program's quality. One segment shows a return to a former town of 50,000 in the Ukraine that was completely evacuated in a period of a few hours about a day after the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986. It is a moment frozen in time, with everything literally left just as it was--dishes on tables, scattered toys, remnants of lives left behind with no time to take more than just what one could carry. The buildings have now decayed to a point where any kind of rehabilitation is impossible, just because of weather and lack of maintenance. Because entrance has been prohibited, and because radiation is enough of a threat to keep people from trying to breach security, there is no vandalism at all.

One mother I worked with was considering placing her severely disabled child in an institution. She had other children to care for, her husband had left her because of the stress of constantly caring for a child with such overwhelming needs, she had no support from her family because the child's behavior was so unpredictable, doctors and other professionals were advising institutional placement, and assistance available to her in the community was so limited. When she went to the institution to discuss her child's admission, they showed her the swimming pool, the greenhouse, the benches and swings on the grounds, the workshops, and the cottages where the children lived. It all looked so supportive, and all the patients she saw seemed happy and busy. As she was leaving, prepared to bring her child there in a few days, one of the nurses pulled her aside and told her that what she had been shown was only applicable to a few of the residents, those with the most abilities and fewest needs. The nurse let her have a glimpse of the kind of ward where a child in her child's condition would be placed--a noisy, smelly ward with no training activities and patients in cribs all day. She kept her child at home.

There are now companies which will store umbilical cord blood for the family's future use in the event of certain diseases. You pay an initial fee, and then monthly storage fees.

Some people bury the placenta, and later plant a tree above the burial spot. In some cultures, people (often just the mother) eat the placenta. This is called placentaphagia, and I thought I had heard of it, but thought maybe it was just some nightmarish idea I had, so I did look it up before I wrote this post. One person who claims to have eaten placenta is Tom Cruise (in an interview with GQ Magazine).

Sleep studies aren't done to turn people into lab rats. They're done to help diagnose seizure disorders, sleep apnea, and sleep disorders. If they are done as part of a research project, there are specific ethical protocols that must be followed.

We don't know what was being logged in this logbook, so we shouldn't jump to the conclusion that it contains confidential patient information. Perhaps it kept track of deliveries to the lab, refrigerator temperatures, or routine maintenance of various pieces of equipment in the lab, like the way fire extinguishers have to be inspected once a month to make sure they are fully charged.

There would not be any problem with staff names being posted. As Lynne has already noted, emergency contacts are required to be prominently posted. This was a state facility, so a person's employment there was a matter of public record.

Out of curiosity, and to add even more "life" to the photo, I did a google search and found several references for "Joanne Wojcik" and "Larry Seidman." One of the Ms. Wojciks is a researcher on mental health topics. Her published work has included studies of cognition in schizophrenia and treatment of nonpsychotic relatives of patients with schizophrenia. One of the Mr. Seidmans is a professor of psychology in the Psychiatry Department of a major university medical school. There is also a Larry Seidman who is a professional photographer.

a quick peek at the Kirkbride buildings site shows Taunton as the earliest, built in 1854, and Fergus Falls as the last, in 1906.

Perhaps our concern with privacy for personal hygiene activities is a modern, fairly recent preoccupation? I remember how humiliating it was to have to use open showers and changing areas in the locker rooms in junior high and high school in the 70s. The junior high was built in the 1920s and the high school in the 1950s. Especially in junior high, we were required to shower after every gym class, which we had at least three times a week. Part of our grade (letter grades, not pass/fail) depended on taking the showers. The only way to get out of it "legally" was to have your period. Then you just had to take a "half-shower," essentially a sponge bath at the sink. You could only get by with this a couple of days a month, though, because the half-showers were noted, too. In recent years my teens have told me that not only do they rarely have gym class, they are not required to change clothes or shower. I also never liked the bathrooms in school (kids sneaking in to smoke, crude jokes, teasing, teachers popping in to try to catch smokers, locks that didn't work on stall doors, paper towel dispensers empty), but I am amazed at how many teenagers today tell me that they refuse to use the bathroom at school, even going all day without food, just to avoid the bathrooms.

Maybe the lower center section (without the crisscross in the middle) was a single fixed pane of glass, and the two lower side sections (with the dividing bars) were casement windows that could be opened for some ventilation, while still being small enough to prevent a person from getting through them.

I wonder if the windows so high above the doors (instead of the transoms right above the door that are common in US architecture of that time) in English construction have something to do with the latitude of England and getting more natural light into the rooms? I've tried to make a model that would demonstrate how light transmitted through a window might vary with the angle of the sun and the location of the window, but I clearly don't know what I'm doing. The latitude of Sussex is 51 degrees North. New York City is 40 degrees North. Calgary, Alberta is 51 degrees North. I know that the further north the latitude, the lower the sun angle. On one site I found an equation for calculating window placement based on latitude, the length of shadows on the first day of summer and the first day of winter, but when math starts talking about declinations and tangents, it's beyond me.

I see this as a sort of metaphor for life. We move daily done the hallway, searching for patches of light. Meanwhile, paradise is just on the other side of the door, if only we can open it.